The Life of the Soul: An Essay in Ecological Thinking
By John H. Riker, PhD
Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College
2003-2004 Distinguished Heinz Kohut Professor, University of Chicago

Heinz Kohut devoted his life to restoring liveliness to souls that somehow had lost their abilities to live fully. Sometimes the life had disappeared into a depressive dullness, sometimes it could only be expressed within painfully narrow compulsive limits, sometimes it blew itself up into a stupendous but empty grandiosity. In addressing the question of how the soul might be able to achieve its fullest life, Kohut was exploring what I think has been the question for Western culture since the middle of the 19th century, a question pursued with unremitting complexity in Henry James' novels, excavated with frightening depth in Nietzsche's philosophy, and exhibited with ferocious intensity in Van Gogh's paintings. It lies behind the great cultural revolutions at the turn of the century, especially in Vienna, where Klimpt, Kokoschka, Otto Wagner, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Berg, Freud, and others purposely disrupted an elegant, quite pleased with itself Vienna in an attempt to make life more than one more variation of a waltz by Strauss.

For a number of the most profound thinkers of the past century and a half, happiness and pleasure do not hit the mark as the goal that life ought to be seeking, for these goals are too tame, too connected with the Crystal Palace and the banality of bourgeois existence. The goal of life, for these thinkers, can be nothing other than to live, to live as intensely and as fully as possible, even if that intensity entails destruction and suffering. Wagner, Nietzsche, Dostoevesky, Charcot, Virginia Woolf, and their comrades courageously destroyed traditional cultural forms which they thought were not fully alive, opened the doors of darkness, and attempted to find deeper forms of life that might be hiding in the insane and possessed, the dispossessed and the desperate, the disordered and the wild.

Did they succeed in bringing our culture into a more profound liveliness? The deepest fear I have encountered in students over the past thirty years is that their lives in particular and life in general might turn out to be boring. The worst thing that can be said about a professor or a class is that they are boring. Students are hesitant about committing themselves in work or love, for long-term anything raises the specter of boredom.
Boredom is life that has lost its liveliness. In having such a desperate fear of boredom, these students express the anxiety that our culture, which seems to be the liveliest ever invented, might be hovering over an abyss of deadliness, an abyss Nietzsche named nihilism and Kohut connected to the ever growing presence of narcissism and its inner deadness. One of the quintessential novels of our age, Madame Bovary, identifies modern life as so shallow and its privileged as so self-centered, that ennui is always lurking on the penumbra of the soul. Emma Bovary, like other modern souls, desperately tries to stave off becoming infected with boredom's deadly poison by doing anything that might give excitement. Indeed, the excitement industry - travel, entertainment, television, sports, etc. is by far the largest sector of the modern economy. When one adds that most of the upper classes shop not for things they need, but as a form of excitement, then I think we can see that today's economy is fundamentally about the production of excitement, or, more exactly, about the production of life understood as excitement. The shockingly high rates of infidelity, the cultural obsession with sex and seduction, and the massive use of illegal drugs can all be seen, in part, as desperate attempts to escape boredom and find life in the excitement of the forbidden.

But is excitement life? Might the overemphasis that our culture places on excitement be a flight from some form of cultural deadness? Might we be confusing vitality with pseudovitality, where pseudovitality involves a great deal of doing that has little meaning and gives no lasting satisfaction? What is real life? What sustains genuine vitality in the soul?

Kohut understood that the lack of genuine life in a soul was due to an injury to the self, whereby 'soul' is meant the field of experiencing and 'self' that which gives unity and continuity to experiencing over time. Kohut thought that if the self could be repaired, even restored, then the field of experience would once more have a zest and liveliness to it. In claiming that the life of the soul requires a harmoniously structured self, Kohut places himself in a classical tradition that has its origins in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, but pits himself against the most thoughtful of the late modern thinkers who find that having a structured self limits the possibility of the soul's liveliness and spontaneous expression. Philosophers as diverse as Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Whitehead have connected the life of the soul not with structure but wildness and the wilderness (Thoreau), Dionysian chaos (Nietzsche), and adventure and creativity (Whitehead). Heidegger elucidates a concept of authentic living without reference to a self and Lacan goes so far as to see the self as a symptom of pathology. When the post-moderns declare the end of grand narratives, the grandest narrative of all that must die is, they proclaim, that of the self. They see the self as standing in the way of life, while Kohut sees the healthy self as the sine qua non of soul life.

This conflict between soul life needing to be grounded in a structured self versus soul life flourishing in chaos, disruption and spontaneous originality is only one of the tensions between the classical philosophical bedrock that undergirds Western culture and the modern reconception of human life. These conflicts constitute a primary reason why our culture seems so confused, indeed, disoriented about what it means to live most alively, a disorientation that makes us highly vulnerable to the market's dominant vision of life as the exciting pursuit of desire. It is thus crucial that we inquire into the questions of what most deeply nourishes the life of the soul and what gives it a sustained liveliness, for nothing less than how we think it best to live is at stake.
Let me begin this inquiry where I think it must begin: in the vision given to us by Plato and Aristotle, for this understanding of the soul's life grounded the West for two millennia and still compels much in how we go about living our lives.

Part I: The Classical Conception of the Soul's Life
Socrates, the first Western psychologist and philosopher who inquired into the soul, made a remarkable, brilliant claim: "And again life? Shall we say that is the function of the soul?" (Republic, 353d) Simple, direct, and, perhaps, the most profound of all truths - the soul's proper activity is life. What the psyche most deeply yearns for is simply to live - to live as fully as it possibly can. Socrates then took a fateful step, perhaps the most fateful step ever taken in Western thought. He might have reveled in the myriad different ways that people find to bring life to the soul - in adventure, love, art, friendship, having children, encountering danger, political maneuvering, gourmet appreciation, discussing philosophy, and so on, but he didn't. Rather he asked, "What kind of life is most alive?" Indeed, he posed this question, "What kind of life is most alive?" as the most fundamental question that a human being can ask and thought that a life which didn't ask this question was not a life worth living. By asking this question he announced, as Jonathan Lear has so eloquently shown (Lear, 2000), that we have lives. Life is not something that merely happens to one, but something we can actively pursue. Not only do we each have a life, but a kind of a life, and it makes all the difference what kind of a life we live. He then proposed a startling idea: the kind of life we lead is determined by the kind of soul we have. Not only does life come in kinds but so do souls.

What kind of soul is most alive? Socrates' and Plato's answer to this question is stunning. They proclaimed that the most alive soul was the soul of an ethical person. The most alive person was one who was just, courageous, self-controlled, and wise; someone who lived by principles rather than personal whims and desires.

Their reasoning for this stunning conclusion was equally stunning. First, Plato and Socrates equated life with activity, with a self-generating motion. As Plato says in the Phaedrus:
All soul is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal. But that which while imparting motion is itself moved by something else can cease to be in motion, and therefore can cease to live. . . we shall feel no scruple in affirming that precisely that is the essence and definition of soul, to wit, self-motion. (245d-e).

From this one basic claim - that the essential activity of the soul is self-motion - we can derive all the major tenets of Plato's philosophy. If self-motion is the essence of the soul, then passivity, or being determined by exterior forces is the negation of this essence. Likewise, if the soul's proper function is life, then its most dreaded enemy, its ultimate violation, is death. Yet, passivity and death seem inevitable, for the soul must respond to objects and sooner or later will be done in by them. It seems then that tragedy offers the proper understanding of the life of the soul. But Plato, who was tempted by but eschewed becoming a tragedian, followed Socrates in thinking that the soul could establish its first-principle as a self-generating motion and thereby come to discover its immortality. When it does, then all the anxiety and passivity that comes from fearing death is overcome and the soul, now secure in the knowledge that its life will never cease, is fully able to live.

To understand how the soul can properly enact its essential activity and achieve fullness of life, it is best to first look at the most tempting form of false life that attracts the soul, the form of life espoused by the Sophists: the life of desire. Desires, for Plato, are atomic, blind impulses that want immediate satisfaction without concern for the person as a whole. They arise not from the soul itself, but typically from the body or from social pressures. And they are ceaseless. As soon as one desire is satisfied another arises, and another, and another, like the hydra's head that simply seems to keep multiplying when one thinks it has been cut off. When we live out of our desires, we are, in Socrates' words, sieves, desperately trying to fill a bucket that is full of holes. We suffer desires and become enslaved to them. This is not life; it is passivity. It is bondage.
The soul properly engaged with its essential life is not the Desiring Soul but the Erotic Soul. Desire seeks to consume the world, to transform what is other into what is mine. Eros loves the world and reverences its beauty. It wants to merge or join with the beauty of its objects, not consume them. Like desire, eros begins in lack, but what it seeks is not this or that satisfaction but the completion of the soul itself. Indeed, the original act in originating the life of eros is the acknowledgement of the lack - the lack of grounded meaning, the lack of knowledge of what it means to be human, the lack of completeness, and the lack of immortality. These gaping holes in the soul, this lack of form, is understood by Plato as a kind of originary ugliness that longs for beauty to transform it. The proper activity of the soul, then, is to fill this chaos by seeking the beautiful and through it becoming itself beautiful by gaining form, knowledge, meaning and immortality.

However, all forms of beauty that are connected to the physical, changeable world are subject to disintegrating forces. That is, they are subject to external causes and can change. To have them as the soul's grounding objects is to endanger the soul, for when they change, the soul suffers and becomes passive. The only object that can truly sustain the activity of the soul is an object that in no way participates in the passive and changeable, namely, the form of beauty itself - pure, eternal, unmoving and immoveable Beauty.

The need for the soul to dwell on Beauty itself, or in the Republic, the Good, can be made clearer by understanding the fundamental principle of all ancient psychology: the soul becomes like the object it intends. If all it intends are the objects of this world - objects that change, come into being and pass out of being - then it retains a chaotic mortal nature. But should it dwell upon eternal, perfect objects, then it, too, cloaks itself in these characteristics and knows its nature for the first time - to be that which has eternal life. Anxiety leaves the soul and we attain a peacefulness that goes with the knowledge that "nothing can harm a good man in life or after death." (Apology, 41d) Paradoxically, the moment in which the self-movement of the soul most profoundly realizes itself is a moment of total stillness, of non-movement. Whatever else the life of the soul is for Plato, this paradox seems to be at its heart.

The most alive life, the most erotic life, then, is the life that seeks and discovers the eternal. But part of the eternal is the ethical. The ethical is the life of principle in which what is particular, that is to say mortal and changeable, is not recognized as compelling. Particularity - our gender, class, nationality, biological desire, and socially constructed desire are all ways in which we participate in passivity, in fields of causation. By rising above our particularity to universal principles which hold for all human beings, we escape the field of causation and gain a different kind of meaning for our lives, a meaning which supercedes the narrowness of constant self-reference that haunts the life of particularity. For Plato, the ethical is not a restriction on our life, but a way to break our bondage to passivity and free the self-motion of the soul.

Finally, that part of the soul that can locate and dwell with the universal and the eternal is, of course, reason. Desires and emotions are tied to the immediate world of change and particularity, but humans have another part of their souls, seemingly unique to them, that can do mathematics, ask about essential definitions, and contemplate essential forms. Reason, with the help of the moral virtues, also has the power to guide and control the desires and emotions. With this control we can have genuinely active, self-determining lives, rather than being at the mercy of the vicissitudes of existence.
While Plato's critique of desire and his attempt to define the life of the soul in terms of a paradoxical union of eros and reason, self-movement and the unmoving universal, might seem antiquarian to us, I will later try to show that he has captured much of what is essential to the life of the soul.

Aristotle transforms the germ of Plato's ideas into a naturalist framework that emphasizes that the life of the soul, understood not as an eternal subjectivity but as lived experience, is essentially connected to a process of becoming. Life is growth, development, actualization. For Aristotle, all species of life involve growth from an initial immature state to a mature state. Each living thing has a natural entelechy, a potentiality, longing to reach a mature state. This concept of potentiality is like Plato's originary lack, but has more of a sense of an unactualized germ longing to achieve a definiteness proper to its species. The mature state for humans is that state which they alone in nature can attain, namely the state of being self-determining beings capable of choosing their own lives. But choosing a life is no easy matter - it requires first that we be able to moderate the power of the passions, for their demand for instant gratification is compulsive and takes away the possibility for choice. Second, we must be able to deliberate about the options and possibilities available to us and select the right one. The development of the moral virtues is what moderates the passions, and the development of the intellectual virtues is what allows us to think well. The moral virtues and reason transform blind impulses and worldly pressures from passive determinations of the soul into proper soul activity. The more we are capable of self-control, sophrosyne, and careful, complex reasoning, the more we are capable of being self-determining agents. Indeed, it is gaining the abilities to control the impulses in the human organism and choose how we want to live that define, in modern terms, what it means to have a self. I think Aristotle is the first theoretician to clearly make the claim that the kind of person capable of the most soul life is the person who develops the most self.

Add one other important Aristotlean doctrine to this picture of the alive soul. In order for the moral virtues to develop, a person needs to grow up in a polis in which the virtues are both modeled and reinforced. When a person develops the moral virtues, such as courage, moderation, justice, benevolence, and generosity, he not only gains a self but becomes the kind of person who can live in and sustain a well-functioning polis. That is, the intellectual and moral virtues not only allow individual agents to emerge, but they are also the traits that allow community to emerge, a community which in turn provides the arena in which the good person is able to enact the virtues.

Here we have the moral equations that have stood as the cornerstone on which Western culture was built. The most alive person is the person who is not passive, not thrown around by circumstances or irrational emotions. The most alive person is the self-determining agent, someone capable of choosing and enacting his own life. Such a person is also the most mature, most actualized, most morally virtuous, most rational, and most community-oriented of human beings. And we can add that this person is also the happiest, for happiness ensues when we develop our deepest human potentials for living a rational, self-directed life.
This classical paradigm for what constitutes the most alive soul can be seen as regnant for the West throughout its history. The emphasis on the life of the soul as rational activity rather emotional passivity underlies the great Hellenistic ethical systems in which the Epircureans sought ataraxia - a cessation of disturbance - and the Stoics sought apathia - the overcoming of suffering due to exterior forces. Even Kant's ethics can be seen as merely purifying the classical system. Since the moral virtues must be inscribed by social agencies and the intellectual virtues learned from teachers, the classical model of the soul still has heteronomous forces working in it. The only fully active, free act of the soul is willing the categorical imperative, for this is the one act in which the soul wills only its own rational nature. The classical paradigm's remnants are still with us in the emphasis we place on the development of reason, self-control, the grammatical abhorrence of the passive voice, and, above all, the active, assertive nature of individuality. But these terms waver in their meanings from those of the classical paradigm because an eruption of thought that began in the late 18th century has modified everything.

Part II: Late Modernity's Conception of the Soul's Life
With Faust, Goethe announces the death of the classical vision. The play opens with Faust as a great philosopher/scientist who has lived the life of the mind - precisely the ancient paradigm of the best life - about to commit suicide, the only act that can adequately express his inner deadness. Reason did not bring life to him but an empty, lonely existence. Rather than killing himself, Faust magically opens up the dark powers of the soul represented by Mephistopholes and proceeds to locate life in emotion, adventure, sex, love, the chaos of Walpurgis Nacht, and even capitalistist land development. On the way he seduces and leaves Margarita, kills her mother and brother, drives her to such insanity that she kills their child, has an affair with Helen of Troy, kills paradigmatically good persons in Baucis and Philemon to get their land for his development project, and for all of his destructiveness and compact with the forces of darkness, he is saved because he has strived. Faust - wild, chaotic, dark, emotional, immoral, disruptive Faust - is the new hero of the modern age, the hero who proclaims that life must include the forces of darkness, irrationality, and chaos to be fully alive.

The shift from life understood as the outcome of rational deliberation and moral control of the passions to life as spontaneity, creativity, concrete particularity, and emotional intensity explodes upon the West at the end of the 18th century and is found in almost all aspects of the culture: in the shift from formal French gardens to the English natural garden with its surprise pagoda or secret pond; the shift from Alexander Pope's ordered couplets to Wordsworth's open verse recalling us to mysteries of nature; the shift from the serenely ordered canvases of David to the wild shapes and colors of Delacroix and Turner; and the shift from the divine harmonies of Bach to the driving dissonances of Wagner. Emerson called us to discover our own originality of experience by spontaneously responding to the nature, and Thoreau wrote, "The most alive is the wildest. . . All good things are wild and free." (Walking, 97, 106) Whitehead, still to me the greatest of the 20th Century philosophers, asserted that life was a creative rather than repetitive response to the environment. Life was above all else, adventure. And in the most thoughtful recent book on the life of the soul, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, Jonathan Lear persuasively argues that life cannot be understood in a system or be systematically prescribed. Life is what remains outside the system, a swerve or break of the soul that occurs for no good reason. Life is that which must disrupt itself in order to live. It is more connected to irrationality than rationality, more to be enacted than understood.

It is Nietzsche who finds the most compelling style to express this new vision of the alive soul. Aphorisms, metaphors, symbols, spontaneous outbursts of rage, delight, disgust, joy, night songs, and unremitting irreverence explode off his pages, bringing to life and making us believe in his vision of the fully alive soul, the overman or free spirit. The free spirit is forever being like a child, spontaneously creating new games to play and then not taking the games too seriously so that they trap him in a structure that then becomes the purpose of life. The most alive soul must value nothing higher than life itself. All metaphysics, all morals, all higher goals are in essence life-destroying for they proclaim that life is worthwhile only if this value can be attained or only if some metaphysical being, such as God, exists. Nothing can be higher than life itself. Even if a structure of meaning is of our own making, it must be challenged and questioned and overcome, or else we become prisoners of our past decisions. Life is will-to-power; and all acts of genuine will destroy previous structures to create new horizons. For what purpose? For no purpose other than the sheer life joy of willing.

While Nietzsche's free spirit can been seen as another attempt to find what kind of soul is most alive, it is an ironic attempt, for it is the kind of soul that refuses to be a 'kind of a soul.' Free spirits enact their particularity and refuse to define themselves in universal terms.

Note that Nietzsche accepts the classical notion that life is in essence the self-movement of the soul, but rejects the notion that this activity is to be seen as reason choosing how to live. Reason is not capable of lifting us out of external determination, for all of its forms are polluted with social determinations. The only true motion of the soul is the will enacting itself - not for a purpose or rational goal, but out of its spontaneously creative particularity.

We are a long way from the classical vision of the life of the soul. For Plato, chaos is the worst enemy of the state and soul; now it is valorized as the proper breeding ground of life. For Aristotle the virtues are habits, reinforced and predicable responses to common human situations. As such the virtues seem to negate a readiness to be creative and spontaneous. Reason - the faculty most revered by the ancients - is now seen as controlling, abstract, impersonal, unspontaneous, and deadly in its effect on the intensity of emotional life. The happy, virtuous, rational person is not only not seen as the most alive kind of human being, but is despised as a false paradigm luring us away from what really is most alive.

It is this emphasis on the spontaneous, creative, particular, and intense as the essence of the soul's life that put into grave doubt whether some kind of substantial self was a necessary ground for its liveliness. Whatever else the self is, it is always seen to carry some kind of identity, some explanation for our felt sameness through time. But sameness is just the opposite of adventure, creativity, and spontaneity. How can something which is permanent, structured, and repetitive explain or ground the possibility for creative, original responses?

Late Modernity stands opposed to the classical vision of the life of the soul in another crucial way. When asked, "What is the greatest danger to the life of the soul?", modernity with almost a singular voice answers, "society." With the coming of mass democratic society, the harmony of self and society so eloquently espoused in Aristotle is shattered. John Stuart Mill was horrified by a new kind of tyranny, the tyranny of the majority. Emerson and Thoreau would have us leave society for nature in order to find our natural vitality.

For these mid-19th century thinkers the dangers of society, such as the pressure to conform, could be consciously recognized and negotiated. What Nietzsche and Heidegger discovered in the next half century was that social forces infiltrated the soul beneath a level of conscious awareness. While these unconscious social forces impose themselves without noticeable trauma and can be uncovered without working through defenses or resistences, they are, nonetheless deadly in their effect on the soul's original vitality.

Nietzsche located society's life-negating force in the institution of morality. Psychologically what moral ideals do is to constrict experience within a narrow range, repress individual expression, and demand a stifling conformity. When we impose moral judgments on others we not only demand that they conform to our standards for what human beings should be but also express our rancor and resentment for having had our own vitality reduced by moral judgments having been imposed on us.

Heidegger goes further. He claims the social collective can colonize subjectivity. "It could be the case that the who of everyday Dasein is precisely not I myself." . . .The 'who' is the neuter, the they. In [its] inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the 'great mass' the way they withdraw, we find 'shocking' what they find shocking." (Being and Time, 119 sec. 27)

When the they colonizes subjectivity, everyday life becomes characterized by idle talk, shallow curiosity, and a tranquilizing busyness. Life falls into an average everydayness, like a stream caught endlessly in an eddy. The subject is not even alive; rather the They, like a parasite, lives through its host body converting it into a token of the social type. Such socially colonized organisms lose awareness of their own being and the Being of beings as they live out the social agenda. The only way Dasein can overcome this social dictatorship is not through reason or the virtues, but by experiencing Angst and being thrown toward its own mortality.
In short, if in the classical model the most alive person was the moral citizen, contemporary philosophers understand that both society and morality are infused with life-negating power. While they understand that we could not be human without society or some ethical system, they hold that in order to be fully alive, we must at some level rebel or retreat from the social order. Life involves a necessary alienation. Thus, the exquisite classical vision of the harmony of individual and society, of a coincident individual liveliness and social vitality is shattered in the modern world. The most alive soul can no longer be the beautifully socialized person, but is the alienated individual who must both affirm her social being and struggle against it.

Worse, not only do unconscious social forces enervate us, but we can have our souls controlled and diminished by unconscious personal forces. This is Freud's piece of the puzzle. Freud found that a soul could turn against itself, constrict its own liveliness, and never know consciously that it was engaged in undermining itself. Life lived through the psychic defenses is repetitive - that is, dulled, and constricted. Projections, transferences, and disassociations distort or distance us from reality, making us feel as if we were living "as if" lives rather than existing in the robustness of reality. The narcissistic defenses cocoon us into small solipsistic universes. The manic defenses make us feel ever-so energized, but it is a false liveliness, a great deal of motion in which nothing much matters except the motion itself.

Strangely the soul enacts these life-lessening defenses in order to protect its very life, for had the defenses not been erected the coherence of the ego might have been shattered by an intense conflict and the person become psychotic. The problem with the defenses is that they seem like a good bargain at first - to protect the ego from traumatic, coherence-shattering conflict and anxiety, but as repetitive structures, they then disallow emotional growth and connection to reality, even when the psyche eventually becomes strong enough to deal with the conflict that traumatized it.

Freud associates the life of the soul with the id. The more the id is able to directly discharge its drive energies, the more alive we feel. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that one of the drives is not for life, but death; yet, the act of discharging aggression is an act of life. But Freud understands that humans with unrestricted id drives cannot form the social communities necessary to sustain the existence of the species. Compromises must be made. The spontaneous discharge of the drives needs to be balanced by attending to reality and the values of the community. The best compromises seem to occur in psyches that have strong egos, or what I will term, selves. The more self there is, the less the organism will experience anxiety and have to use defenses to control the id forces. Defensive structuring of psychic dynamics always results in less life than when an ego can sustain its coherence and find either sublimated activities or substitute objects for drives that have unacceptable consequences in social reality.

Hence, the best realistic solution to how to be most alive is to develop a self or "I" capable of living in a social reality without excessive repression of the drives or guilty submission to an overly demanding superego when necessary. This need for a structured self to sustain life dramatically contrasts with the direction taken by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Lacan's reading of Freud.

Now you can see we are in a mess. The conflicts between these sundry notions about the life of the soul do not condense into a nice set of binary oppositions that can be resolved dialectically. It is a melee of ideas. The reigning response to this melee seems to be to respect diversity and revel in the myriad ways in which souls can choose to live. This response would have us give up Socrates' question about which kind of soul is most alive and admit that any way a soul can find to live in its particular conditions of existence is to be affirmed. This position is surely right in claiming that there can be no single best way for all souls to live. And it is profoundly right in claiming that acceptance and affirmation of the particular form of life we are living is crucial for the liveliness of the soul. Yet, I do not want to give up Socrates' question, for without this inquiry we would, I think, not be quite so alive. And just because there might not be some ideal kind of soul for all of us to have does not mean that some very important things can't be said about what crushes or enlivens the life of the soul.

The predominant historical way for resolving these tensions about the life of the soul has been to think about them hierarchically, to arrange them in order of importance, or to have one major psychic function, such as reason or creative response, become the leading carrier of the life of the soul. I prefer to think about these ideas ecologically, that is as forming a complex web of balances and tensions, in which each of the ideas and thinkers I have mentioned so far has understood a salient part of the ecosystem of the soul. Hierarchy makes us forgetful of what it leaves out or diminishes. When our hierarchical minds are seduced by Nietzsche, they forget Aristotle's truths; when they are on Heidegger's path to Being, they dangerously lose sight of the need for personal and social ethics. Hence, ecological thinking fits with Wittgenstein's dictum that philosophy be "a set of reminders" recalling us to what we know but have forgotten because some brilliant theory has blinded us.

Part III: Ecological Resolutions:

I want to think ecologically about the tensions raised in this paper by first elucidating a theory that weaves together a number of their insights: the psychoanalytic theory of Heinz Kohut.
Kohut claims that we all start our psychological lives as a reservoir of narcissistic grandiosity. I believe that Kohutian grandiosity is the exuberant, wild, dynamic, chaotic spontaneity cherished in modern thought. It reverberates with Plato's self-moving soul, Freud's libido, Bergson's elan vital, and Thoreau's wildness. It is akin to Lacan's jouissance, or, as psychoanalyst Michael Eigen writes, "In the beginning is Jouissance, and Jouissance in delirium sings, dances, creates the Word. Aliveness is ecstasy." (1998, 135) This original grandiosity is the kind of energy that Nietzsche has in mind when he images the highest metamorphosis of the soul as being a child, "a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes'." (Zarathustra, 27) Grandiose energy lives in the chaos of a soul that has, as yet, no self to structure it.
But this grandiosity is also without form and, hence, is only a potentiality. It is energy that is in a divine state, a state of perfection. It has not yet incarnated. It is also narcissistic energy - energy that has no concern for others, no concern for the necessary conditions that make life possible, no concern for development. In order to actualize and live, it must incarnate. The primal energy must transform into a self.

Kohut claims the development of the self follows two paths. First, the grandiose child soon realizes that it is not the master of the world; indeed, it is the world's most vulnerable entity. This causes great anxiety and in response the child takes a portion of its perfection and projects it into its parents or caretakers, idealizing them as gods whose fundamental concern is, of course, to care for and protect the child. If parents can carry this idealization well, then later the child will be able to re-integrate this projected perfection back into itself, but now in terms of having its own ideals. These ideals form a teleological part of the self, a part that lures the organism to develop by providing the hope of re-experiencing its own perfection through realizing its ideals. When the idealizing function of the self is healthy, life is alive with direction, for there is a meaning to be achieved, and as it is achieved the psyche glows in its perfection - just as Plato said.

The second path of transformation sees the grandiose energy converting into what Kohut calls ambitions or what I would term a person's ability to be assertive and active in the real world without undue guilt or sadistic aggression. It is the thrust behind Aristotle's sense of agency. Its energy is vectoral. It is the vitality we have available for doing and living. It is our zest for life now. In contrast, the idealized pole concerns meanings to be realized; its energy is scalar. It lures us to be more than what we now are.

In order to intersect the real world and be effective, the vectoral energy of the grandiose pole must, as Aristotle said, undergo a developmental training, or what Kohut calls optimal frustration. In optimally frustrating experiences the child replaces infantile greatness with the sense of worth that comes through accomplishment. For instance, when the young child receives the command that it must give up its infantile defecation habits and use a toilet, it is deflating to its infantile grandiosity. But, if the toilet can be mastered, the sense of greatness that accompanies this triumph will replace the original infantile grandiosity. This replacement of infantile grandiosity with the self esteem that comes through accomplishment moves the psyche over time from being completely subject to the responsiveness of the world to being a self-determining agent capable of living in reality.

The remainder of the grandiose energy, what is left over after portions of it have been transformed into ideals and ambitions, is a sheer exuberance of being alive. It sometimes takes the form of sexual libido, sometimes expresses itself in sheer aesthetic delight, sometimes it comes forth as playfulness, and sometimes as the spark of creative imagination. It is this part of life that classical philosophy left out, and which Nietzsche, Thoreau, and the Romantics remind us is essential.

When the idealized pole and sense of agency unite with the idiosyncratic predispositions and talents of a person, a nuclear self is formed. This self harbors the original liveliness of the organism, gives it disciplined energy for action, and generates a strong sense of meaningfulness in its ideals. It is a self that embodies the ideals of Plato, the developmental path toward self-determination of Aristotle, and the creative verve of Nietzsche. By balancing these three senses of life, Kohut avoids the infantilism and lack of development that haunts Nietzsche's free spirit, the over control of Aristotle's virtuous agent, and the negation of particularity that mars Plato's thought.

What is crucial is that the three strands of the original energy be well-balanced. Too much energy in the idealized pole with concomitant injuries to the grandiose side of the self leads to attempting to live out an idealized version of who one is, without ever feeling real or grounded in one's particularity. Since one can never be equal to an ideal, such a person can fill with unconscious guilt and self loathing. On the other hand, if the grandiose pole is intact but the idealizing function is injured, then one can engage in a great deal of activity, but lack a sense that it is meaningful. Life is full of action, but it has an internal deadness to it. If too much of the grandiosity is devoted to accomplishment, one can lose a sense of the joy, creativity, and playfulness of life. Life becomes a bit too much of a serious business.

Finally, if too much of the grandiose energy is left in its original narcissistic state - unorganized and ready for spontaneous involvement, then a kind of shallowness of experience ensues. While it is easy to find each of these kinds of unbalanced energies in our culture, I think that this last imbalance is especially endemic, due to our culture's emphasis on spontaneous excitement as the most lively form of life. An overemphasis on life as spontaneity entails that one can be fully alive without development, without the attempt to forge oneself through difficult choices, without deepening one's aesthetic awareness or complexifying one's ideals. Hence, we live in a pop culture whose forms of life seem too often to revolve around teenage exuberance; that is, to revolve around the age in which first spontaneous choices are made. Youth is valorized as the apex of life, and adulthood appears as a set of burdens and responsibilities that make life a bit less alive. Many young people dread the thought of growing up. The classical understanding that genuine self-determination requires the moral and intellectual virtues and needs to take place in a structure of meaning that is not merely self-referential is needed here to balance the picture.

Add one more important part of Kohutian theory to this picture of the soul's life. Kohut found that the self could not sustain its vitality without the aid of others assuming its functions, almost totally in infancy and then at different times throughout life. He found that the grandiose energy of the self needed to be empathically mirrored and soothed in order to remain vital and that the sense of meaningfulness could not be sustained unless early caretakers were comfortable being idealized and did not violate that idealization. As such, he thought the key to sustaining the liveliness of the soul was having others close to one who are capable of empathic mirroring, holding idealization, and, later, forming twinship relationships. Those who play these roles for us Kohut entitled self-objects, because they function as part of ourselves. He went so far as to say that self objects are as crucial to psychological life as oxygen is to biological life. By including this strong notion of interdependency, Kohut breaks with the value of self-sufficiency that runs from Plato through Nietzsche and incorporates the strongest value of feminist philosophy. Plato's truth that the soul is a self-moving principle must be balanced by an opposing equal truth: the soul cannot live without the care of others. Parents, friends, and beloveds are as vital to the life of the soul as any internal principle it develops.

While Kohut helps us see how the classical emphasis on ideals and rational agency can fit with the modern emphasis on exuberant spontaneity and interdependency, his theory is far from a complete theory of what is needed for the life of the soul. For one, he does not address the problems of living in contemporary society. One could have a healthy self from a self-psychological point of view and still succumb to the enervating forces of the social unconscious. Here I think Kohut's psychology of the self needs to be supplemented with Heidegger's ontological investigation of subjectivity.

For Heidegger, we cannot free ourselves from the invasive "They" and the generalized everyday life it forces on us unless we can come to experience the Being of our ownmost being, unless we can descend into the concrete particularity and mystery of our own existence. We need to retreat from the busyness of everyday life, the demands of moral responsibility, and the usual psychological places our souls occupy to rediscover a place where we wonder at the very being of conscious experience, where we become in Heidegger's words, Dasein. Dasein is our radical contingency - we might not have been at all, there is no final explanation as to why we are who we are or why we are in the particular world that we inhabit, and we will, certainly, at some indefinite time, cease to be entirely. To authentically affirm one's life is, for Heidegger, to anticipate one's death, to affirm living even knowing that one's ownmost most certain possibility is the impossibility of oneÕs existence. In this paradoxical place of authentically being ourselves, we do not reference experience to an "I" but to "is". Heidegger lets us see that the life of the soul is not only psychological, but ontological; we might be humans with their peculiar kind of psyche but we also participate in Being. Indeed, we participate in Being at that wondrous metaphysical place where Being discloses itself to itself. To be fully alive, we must be attuned to this place.

The second way Kohut's psychology of the self needs philosophy is that it lacks a critical theory of what constitutes mature agency. While the psychoanalyst needs to concern herself with how deeply the ability to be assertive and energetically alive has been injured, mature humans need to be able to advance beyond the narcissistic ambitiousness of childhood to mature responsible agency. This transformation, I believe, can occur only by developing the moral and intellectual virtues identified by Aristotle. These virtues are not to be conceived of as social impositions and constrictions of a vital individuality, but as the means - the "by virtue of" - through which the individual can realize her own powers and potentialities. That our culture often fails to recognize that the virtues must be added to ambitiousness in order to generate mature agency is revealed all too often in scandals like that at Enron. Here the misunderstanding of the life of the soul has had dire effects on the entire economy and the vitality of the nation.

The third major lack in Kohut's theory is that he does not address what kind of ideals need to be developed by mature persons. He shows that healthy human functioning requires the ability to be moved by ideals, but does not comment on how to distinguish repressive, immature, limited, or false ideals from those that reflect the deepest commitments of the self and its humanity. Nor should he, for this is the work of philosophy. As a philosopher, I want to add to Kohut's theory that insofar as our ideals relate only to our pursuits for personal pleasure and grandiose stature they will fail to issue into a full liveliness of the soul. To live as an isolated atom in forgetfulness that one's being is given by and sustained through others in a community is to be, in Hegel's and Kierkegaard's words, an abstraction. It is a failure to acknowledge one's own humanity. When our ideals are too concentrated on the "I", then we can live on the precipice of meaninglessness, are constantly restless and anxious about the worth of our personal existence, and are tortured between asserting our greatness while all the time knowing its insignificance in the wider range of things. Such a person will be able to engage only in shallow friendships, for no friendship can sustain the absence of ethical concern. And such persons will tend to project their own self-centeredness onto others and condemn themselves to live in a world they see as hostile, greedy, and uncaring.

I think the life of the soul, therefore, does require that the ideals that sustain us in mature life have some ethical component in them, some concern for wider, more permanent structures of value, some way of recognizing that we are social beings, rational beings, and, as Marx says, species beings. The most alive soul is an ethical soul. Indeed, I think that Plato is right when he says that the soul longs for the eternal and the universal. Even further, I agree with Plato that participating in the universal gives a sense of life to the soul that it can get in no other way. The kind of life that ensues from participating in this realm has the character of radiance, a quality seemingly absent from lives devoted to the merely personal. This radiance carries a peacefulness without loss of vitality, a quietness that is fully alive, a sense of deep purposefulness to life. Neither excitement nor personal accomplishment can give this state of mind. It is, as Plato and Aristotle say, life taken to another level, a level at which the intense anxiety about being a personal self is overcome.
And, yet, we must be careful, for balanced against the need to hold our lives up to ideals is the need to affirm, accept and even delight in just who we are. As Michael Eigen says in speaking of people whose lives have been blocked by various psychopathologies, "The problem is that these so-called deformations are life itself - mixtures of ambition, aggression, rivalry, envy, ugliness, beauty, cruelty, love, passion, wonder, hate, beatific surges, bitterness, openness, rigidity, resolve, vacillation." (1999, p. 203) Life is not what ought to happen but what does happen. While ideals have an important role to play in sustaining the life of the soul, the first principle of soul life must be to accept whoever and whatever one is. The second principle is that one must hold oneself accountable to her ideals.

This tension leads us, in the final act of this paper, back to Plato's Phaedrus. In that dialogue Plato metaphorizes the soul's life as a chariot being pulled by a dark horse full of unruly jouissance coupled with a calm white horse full of order, meaning, and obedience. In this metaphor Plato recognizes that the soul has multiple parts and these are forever in conflict with one another. That is, the life of the soul is dynamic. What I have proposed in this paper is that the dynamism of the soul is not just two horses dialectically struggling with one another, but a huge herd of horses of every hue, each with its own energy and gift to give the life of the soul. Plato's way of solving the soul's conflicts, at least in the Republic, is to call upon a strong charioteer to hierarchically reign in the soul's unruly parts, giving kingship to reason and peasanthood to the desires and emotions. Two millennia later Nietzsche and Freud revealed the repressions and life-defeating tendencies of such a psychic arrangement, and our political history has revealed the unremitting violence contained in it.
Rather than thinking of the soul as consisting of two opposed elements - one good and one problematical, think of the psyche as a complex ecosystem with many populations in delicately balanced interdependencies and tensions with each other. Each of the parts of the psyche is a good that has the possibility of becoming evil if it is overly powerful or under-represented. We have seen many of these tensions already - the need for original spontaneity vs. organizing ourselves ethically, the longing for universal meaning vs. the need to ground ourselves in our Dasein particularity, the need to be a self-generating motion vs. our need for self objects, the need to belong to a community vs. the need to free ourselves from its everydayness, the need to be emotionally spontaneous and playful vs. the need to be serious and rationally plan our lives in order to have a life. The soul's ecosystem can be rent in many ways, but its most serious rents occur when a part of the soul is disassociated from it and falls into the unconscious where it can symptomatize the organism, undermine the liveliness of the soul, and bring unintentional pain and suffering to others. The retrieval of these unconscious parts is not, for me, a matter of personal choice but one of ethical duty.

How can we retrieve these parts and hold the tensions together in a dynamic full life of the soul if we do not invoke a strong charioteer to do the reigning in? I believe the answer lies in Eros, in living erotically.
For Plato Eros longingly seeks union with the beautiful in order that the soul might complete itself. Spinoza's variation of this principle is that genuine love increases our ability to be active rather than passive, and Freud adds that Eros is forever seeking to join disparate elements into greater harmonies. These most thoughtful of our thinkers point to erotic life as the life of development, of expanding horizons, and of deeper more complex integrations of soul life. When we lovingly retrieve a lost piece of ourselves from the unconscious, we feel a dynamic increase in activity, for the psychic energy that had been used for repetitive defensive purposes is now available for life. When we fall in love with someone in the world and unite with their beauty, we soar with radiant energy.

We live in an age which favors the life of desire in forgetfulness of that which is the proper self-generating motion of the soul, Eros. The difference between the Desiring Soul and the Erotic Soul is that desires need not involve deep commitment or a developmental urge, but Eros does. Erotic commitment entails memory and steadfastness; erotic development entails growth and openness. Once I forget why I became a philosopher or cease growing as a philosopher, I lose my eros for philosophy and start becoming, as they say, deadwood. Once I forget how we fell in love or cease trying to be more capable of intimacy, I cease having eros for my marriage, and love falls into an average everyday routine. While our souls can be erotically stimulated whenever they encounter beauty, our erotic commitments must, by necessity, be few. And these few must express the essence of our nuclear selves or else they will dissipate our energies.

While what eros seeks can differ from person to person, its one necessary object must be the soul itself. It is eros that calls us to undertake the journey to "know thyself" and through that knowing to become whole. What needs unification, what needs beauty, what needs to gather its manyness into a harmony is the soul. This gathering cannot be done by a ruthless rational charioteer organizing the soul in hierarchical ways, for this always involves more fragmentations. Rather, when eros is allowed to flourish in the soul, we come to love all the parts of ourselves and their tensions, and can love and even laugh at the impossibility of being human.
Eros is not to be understood as another transformation of primal energy - it is not like ambition or ideals or creative spontaneity, although it shares characteristics with each of these. If it has a relationship to the originary state of grandiose perfection, it is, as Aristophanes' myth and Hans Loewald tell us, an attempt to recapture a sense of wholeness. But it cannot do this by regressing, by returning to pure potentiality, but only in actualizing, in integrating itself with itself and the world. Hegel's Geist striving to achieve actuality by developing increasingly more complex forms of subjectivity and world relatedness is pure Eros. The reason Eros cannot be another part or function is that it must gather the parts and functions into a whole. It seems to lurk in the interstices and penumbra of the soul - sometimes dormant, sometimes awakened. When awakened, it gathers the soul's parts, makes us feel whole, and infuses us with life. This erotic cathexis of the self is not narcissistic - its aim is neither to express grandiosity nor to defensively inflate an injured self. Rather, the soul's eros directed toward itself is what keeps it growing and developing - like Aristotle's entelechy - reaching for ever wider meanings, ever more integration within the vast ecosystem of the soul, and ever longing to ecologically dwell on this earth. Along with its closest friend, suffering, it is what compels us to descend into the dangerous pit of the unconscious in heroic attempts to retrieve a part of ourselves that had been lost. It is what seeks ever more complex forms of experience to express the growing complexity of the soul's increased integration. It is either the most profound expression of the self or even more ontological than the self itself, the very loam out which the self emerges. It is, as Plato says, a great daimon - a divine spark longing to unite with ever more transcendent forms of beauty.

The deadness that lurks under the surface of our very lively culture has, as we have seen, many sides, but, perhaps, the most important is that the life favored by economics, the life of desire, has supplanted the life of Eros. The life of desire and excitement is lively, its pursuits so easy in comparison to the arduous commitments of Eros. But the glow of Las Vegas is not a genuine radiance. It is a siren luring us away from our proper journeys, luring us from ever returning to Ithaca. It was Eros - for Penelope, for his homeland, for his own wholeness - which kept Odysseus on his journey, and Eros which keeps us on ours. When we fill with Eros we become radiantly beautiful and our souls are alive with life.

Works Cited
Eigen, Michael (1998) The Psychoanalytic Mystic. London: Free Association Books.
Eigen, Michael (1999) Toxic Nourishment. London: Karnac Books.
Lear, Jonathan (2000) Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh, trs. Albany: SUNY Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1978) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Tr. Richard Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press.
Plato, (1966) Collected Dialogues. Hamiliton & Cairns, eds. New York: Random House.
Thoreau, (1991), Walking, in "Emerson, Nature, Thoreau, Walking", Boston, Beacon Press.